We Shall Fight on the Beaches by Winston S. Churchill

He and his brave, efficient Army, nearly half a million strong, guarded our left flank and thus kept open our only line of retreat to the sea. Yet at the last moment, when Belgium was already invaded, King Leopold called upon us to come to his aid, and even at the last moment we came. Had not this Ruler and his Government severed themselves from the Allies, who rescued their country from extinction in the late war, and had they not sought refuge in what was proved to be a fatal neutrality, the French and British Armies might well at the outset have saved not only Belgium but perhaps even Poland. The King of the Belgians had called upon us to come to his aid. But another blow which might well have proved final was yet to fall upon us. The whole root and core and brain of the British Army, on which and around which we were to build, and are to build, the great British Armies in the later years of the war, seemed about to perish upon the field or to be led into an ignominious and starving captivity.

These were the hard and heavy tidings for which I called upon the House and the nation to prepare themselves a week ago. But it certainly seemed that the whole of the French First Army and the whole of the British Expeditionary Force north of the Amiens-Abbeville gap would be broken up in the open field or else would have to capitulate for lack of food and ammunition. I thought-and some good judges agreed with me-that perhaps 20,000 or 30,000 men might be re-embarked.

When, a week ago today, I asked the House to fix this afternoon as the occasion for a statement, I feared it would be my hard lot to announce the greatest military disaster in our long history. Text of Churchill’s ‘Never Surrender’ Speech Listen to Winston Churchill's 'We Shall Fight on the Beaches' Speech Close

We Shall Fight on the Beaches by Winston S. Churchill